Voting

Voting is a fundamental process in any democratic system, whether you’re voting for your country’s elections, your corporation, and even DAOs.

DAOs employ a voting mechanism that enables its voters (token holders) to choose what course of action will be taken after a proposal or a resolution has been submitted.

Each token may hold a voting power, depending on the following selected voting type:

Single Choice Voting

Each holder may select his/her preferred choice using their total voting power.

This may usually constitute 1 voting power with 1 token held (either staked or unstaked).

The choice voted by the majority of holders wins.

Approval Voting

This voting mechanism has more than two choices where voters approve them before the formal voting begins. Each choice will receive a proportional number of votes for each token held by the voter.

Quadratic Voting

The voters spread their voting power across multiple choices, depending on the strength of their preferences.

The winning choice may not come from the most popular vote, but rather results are calculated quadratically with the number of tokens square rooted to the number of votes.

This voting type hinges on the assumption that “people are more likely to vote strongly not only about issues they care more about, but issues they know more about”.

Gitcoin is an example of how Quadratic voting is applied to funding public goods. Their formula puts more weight into grants with many small donations than few with large donations.

Examples of public goods are open source software, news, public projects, creative (arts), etc.

Ranked Choice Voting (Instant-runoff Voting)

This type of voting is used when there are more than two choices in the selection, where each choice is ranked by the voters according to their preference.

The voters who selected their top choice which is then defeated will be added to the total of their next top choice.

When the field is left with the top two choices, the total votes of both will be counted and compared against each other.

The choice with at least half or have the most first choices wins the vote and the choice with the fewest vote is eliminated.

Weighted Voting

Weighted voting is a type of voting that has a variable that may determine the outcome of the process.

Common examples of weighted voting are the US Electoral College and the European Council, where the votes of each member state with their electors (variable) are proportional to their population or other conditions set by their constitution, or in a DAOs case, the code.

Key Takeaways

Depending on what type of voting your organization uses, there are limits to their application and opportunities to improve.

Single choice and approval voting can be centralized, where few token holders (whales) can hold much power versus the whole organization.

These voting mechanisms have several weaknesses like Sybil attacks or the use of fake identities to influence the community towards favoring one choice. Use of social profiles tied to each voter or limiting one vote per person may avoid this common problem in voting.